For bounties on breaking the Legendre PRF, please see bounties for algorithmic bounties and here for concrete key recovery puzzles.

The Legendre PRF

The Legendre pseudo-random function is a one-bit PRF defined using the Legendre symbol:

Suitability for MPC

Thanks to a result by Grassi et al. (2016), we know that this PRF can be evaluated very efficiently in arithmetic circuit multi-party computations (MPCs). Due to the multiplicative property of the Legendre symbol, a multiplication by a random square does not change the result of an evaluation. By additionally blinding with a random bit, the Legendre symbol can be evaluated using only three multiplications, two of which can be done offline (before the input is known).

To compute the Legendre symbol for an input (square brackets indicate a shared value):

Choose a quadratic non-residue

Pre-compute a random square and a random bit

Open the value

Compute on the open value

The result of the computation is

Bounties

Because of its suitability for MPCs, the Legendre PRF is used in a construction for the Ethereum 2.0 protocol. In order to encourage research in this PRF, we announced some bounties at Crypto’19. See bounties.